BACKGROUND
One of the prominent saints from Christianity, St. George. His cult is widespread all over the world and he is particularly popular on within the Catholic creed as protective holy warrior. There are several literary works that depict his adventures – with the Golden Legend and the Seven Champions of Christendom being the most famous.
…however, those are mostly fanciful tales with little to no base in real facts. The man who became the source for those tales was someone with a very different past.
His story originated in the Middle East. Around 270 AD, in the city of Lydda, Palestine, a young boy was born from a couple of Greek descent. The father, Gerontios, was an officer in the Roman army, while the mother, Polychronia, was the daughter of a local noble house. Both were devout Christians who valued the quality of humility. As such, they decided to call their son Georgios, which in Greek meant “worker of the land” (i.e. farmer).
Georgios’ early life was a happy, albeit uneventful one. As expected of the young son of a well-to-do family, most of his childhood was spent receiving lectures on the most varied subjects, including the Christian beliefs. Naturally, he eventually grew up to be an educated, pious Christian.
Midway into his adolescence, Georgios parents passed away and left him with no living relatives. Suddenly having to choose his fate for himself, he decided to follow his father’s footsteps and applied to become a soldier of the Roman Empire in the capital city of Nicomedia. It was around them that he met with Emperor Diocletian.
Diocletian knew Georgios’ father from his time in the army and held the man in high esteem. Thus, he naturally decided to take the son of his late friend under his wing and help him in his career. With the support of the Emperor himself, Georgios quickly climbed ranks in the Roman army, eventually becoming a member of the Imperial Guard.
Georgios had everything to become a successful officer in the army, but a twist of fate changed that.
Facing political pressure, Diocletian was forced to issue an edict against the Christians within the Empire. Impelled by his sense of justice, Georgios publicly repudiated that edict. Declaring himself a believer of Jesus Christ to all his fellow soldiers, he swore to do everything in his power to protect the persecuted Christians.
This left Diocletian very upset. If Georgios continued to disobey imperial orders in his quest, he would eventually be sent to the gallows. Diocletian did not wished to lose one of his best officers like that. Besides, he felt he had to save Georgios for the sake of his late friend’s memory. The Emperor promised titles and riches to Georgios in exchange of he converting himself to the Roman gods.
He received an immediate refusal.
“Of all things, do not ask that from me!” Georgios scolded in a rare moment of anger. “Do not ask me to betray everything that I believed to be righteous throughout my whole life. To do so would turn all that I did until now into lies. And more than anything…”
…Georgios’ faith was the last heirloom his parents left him. To abandon it also meant turning his back to them. As a good son who loved his family, that alone was something he could never do.
Accepting that his efforts were futile, Diocletian had no choice but to have Georgios punished for his crime. He was then arrested for treason against the Empire and forced to go through many tortures. During this time, Georgios was continuously pressed to renounce his faith, but he remained devoted to the end. Finally, he was exposed to the eyes of the public at Nicomedia’s city walls and then executed by decapitation.
This is the story of Georgios, the man with the soul of a martyr. Afterwards, when his tale was spread across the Christendom, he became known as St. George, the Saint of Providence who guards the weak and saves the oppressed.
Incidentally, though he had a relatively short military career, Georgios still had the opportunity to travel across all over the Empire while under the service of Diocletian.
The Original Crusader (Knight of the Cross)
There is an agreement among modern scholars that most of the known heroic tales involving St. George are fabrication. Preposterous allegories written in times of ignorance, by and for a people that desperately needed something to believe in… but one tale holds a special position among them.
A long time ago, the inhabitants of the city of Silene, Lybia, were being tyrannized by the existence of an evil dragon. It had made a nest near a lake, which was the only source of drinkable water that the city had. Every time that the dragon left its nest to hunt for food, it would spill its poisonous breath over the lake and pollute its waters.
In order to have it constantly withdrawn into his nest, the people of Silene began to sacrifice their livestock and feed them to the dragon. However, that served only as a temporary solution and eventually livestock alone was not enough to keep it satiated. With the very survival of the city at stake, the king of Silene took a drastic measure: they would start to send out their own children to become the dragon’s meals.
The counter-measured worked, and for a time the city was at peace.
But the people were still suffering.
Parents fell in despair when the city’s lottery selected their child to be the next sacrifice. Children cried in vain as the city’s soldiers took them away from their houses and escorted them to the dragon’s nest. The people pleaded for the king to find another solution, but he ignored them, saying that everything was for the sake of Silene.
That tragedy continued on, until one day the name of the princess came out of the lottery. As she was his only and beloved daughter, the king became distraught with grief at the thought of losing her. He tried to appeal for the people to spare her, going as far as bribing them with riches and territory. But they refused.
“You forced us to abandon our own children to that beast,” they said “So why now you should not make the same sacrifice yourself? O king, know some shame!”
Forced by the circumstances, the king had to sent his daughter to the nest in order to become a sacrifice. Always dignified, the princess accepted her fate without crying or making protests. In a gesture of bravery, she left alone for the nest without taking a escort with her… but fear began to overwhelm her in the middle of the way.
At that moment, maybe by coincidence or maybe by fate, a traveling Georgios passed by the region and met with the princess. Seeing her distressed figure, he immediately extended a helping hand towards her. Of course, the princess refused.
“Please good sir, do not bother yourself with me. Just go away.”
She told him everything. She told him how her people was victimized because of the dragon, and how her own father trampled on their suffering by forcing them to do the abominable. Since it had come to this, it was only natural for her to be sacrificed in order to compensate for the sin of her father and appease some of the people’s resentment.
“I understand what you’re saying,” the warrior said, his eyes overflowing with conviction. “But your feelings and circumstances are completely unrelated from my desire to save you.”
Completely disregarding the pleas of the princess, Georgios met the evil dragon in battle. And after a long, arduous battle, the guardian knight was able to inflict a fatal wound on the beast with the divine spear Ascalon. As the dragon was laying on the ground in agony, Georgios improvised a leash from the princess girdle and dragged the monster back to Silene. It has been said that, upon seeing what the holy warrior had accomplished with the blessings of his God, the whole city was converted to Christianity, starting from the king himself.
…It is unsure of how much of that anecdote is truth. But since vague accounts and evidences supporting it have appeared from several sources over time, some people have reservations in simply discarding it as a fabrication.
At any rate, this is seen as one of the earliest accounts of a “knight-errant”, which have set the foundations for the concept of chivalry. In special, back in the Middle Ages, the Crusaders found great inspiration in this tale about a warrior that travels far away from home and defeats a great evil in order to save the innocents.
Originally Posted by Sherrinford
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